Session 1 : The Erotic, Film and the Novel
Chair: Rob Fisher
Carnal Unknowing: The Structural Function of the Erotic in the Period
Film
Olivia Macassey
Department of Film Television and Media
Studies, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
What makes the past so sexy? In the last two decades
there have been a significant number of romantic mainstream films,
set in our colonial pasts. The subject of these films is primarily
erotic. As texts, these films are informed by post-colonial conditions
of production – contemporary
conditions in which there are knowledges of the traumatic, often violent
realities of colonization. However, there is no trace of the ‘reality'
of the past in Period films. Or is there?
The most common explanation
for why history is romanticised so often in the Period film has been
that the setting – so often restrictive
and sartorially elaborate - facilitates the filmic expression of sexual
desire. That is, contemporary notions about historical erotics make
the past a good structural match for the expression of current concerns.
However, this does not adequately account for the persistent combination
of return and effacement which characterises the genre.
Cathy Caruth
has noted that, in encountering trauma, there is the possibility of
a history that is not straightforwardly based on the referential. That
is, an atemporal history of erasures and substitutions. Her observations
on trauma offer a possible insight into the question of Period romance;
for this type of history is surely what we are encountering here. In
fact, the structure of trauma is explicitly present in the period film,
because the erotic, like the traumatic, is too corporeal to be straightforwardly
symbolised.
This paper brings trauma theory, postcolonial theory and
film theory to bear on several Period films, including Jane Campion's The
Piano (1993)
and David Lean's A Passage to India (1984). I argue that
the reason for the sex appeal of setting lies, paradoxically, not in
its enhancement of the power of the erotic, but rather in its link
to the traumatic. The structure of the erotic body itself enables us
to address unpalatable spectres of history through temporality, analogy,
and displacement.
The Erotic in Rhetoric: The Erotic and
the Ancient Greek Novel
Koen De Temmerman
Department of Latin & Greek, Faculty of Arts & Philosophy, Ghent
University, Ghent, Belgium
This paper takes a literary-historical approach towards
the concept of the erotic. Being a classical scholar, I examine the
representation of the erotic in the ancient Greek novel. This designation
refers to a series of ancient Greek stories of love and adventure that
were written in the first centuries A.D. In this period the literature
was permeated by the use of the principles and techniques of ancient
rhetoric. Since these stories undeniably have in common many fundamental
characteristics with the “modern” novel, which is traced back by traditional
literary histories only to Cervantes' Don Quichote, they can
rightly be said to have constituted the oldest novelistic genre of
Western civilization.
My paper makes clear that it is precisely the
representation of the erotic in the Greek novel that provides the genre
with a unique place within its literary and cultural context (cf. Konstan
1994)
and argues that it is the rhetorical techniques of characterization
that shape this representation. Starting from the opposition between
the representation of the erotic in the Greek novel and its representation
in other, contemporary, literary genres, the paper will broaden its
perspective to tackle the issue of sexual ethics in late antiquity.
Parallel to the ethical concepts of Stoicism and Christianity, sexual
ethics underwent a radical evolution during the last century of the
Hellenistic period and the first centuries A.D. This paper shows how
the Greek novel, a fictive and narrative prose genre from late antiquity,
constitutes the first currently known literary locus in which the dominant
sexual ethics of 2000 years to come are represented.
Eroticism in Contemporary Cuban Fiction: Mechanisms
for Subversion and Resistance
Angela Donado-Otero
Queen Mary, University of London,
School of Modern Languages, London, United Kingdom
I propose to read
a paper in which I shall examine the importance of sexuality and eroticism
in contemporary Cuba, as portrayed in the literature of the 1990s.
I posit that the boom in the prominence of the erotic subject in recent
Cuban fiction can be explained by means of the social and political
situation of the country during the last decade. During this period
the government officially launches what has become known as “Special
Period,” in which political struggle must
continue with fewer material resources, as the collapse of the former
USSR left the country with the loss of a powerful ally to subsidize
part of the country's economy. This time of economic crisis made the
government open its doors to and market itself for capitalist tourism,
which has given rise to the resurgence of prostitution on the island.
I claim that eroticism at times, as reflected in recent fiction, is
portrayed as a mechanism for survival at the same time as it represents
a locus of freedom and resistance against political stagnation and
conservatism. To this freedom the Cuban subject now adds the religious
dimension of what was once a clandestine practice: “santeria”. I claim
that the emphasis on the erotic as a process linked to self-knowledge
portrays the individual as an empowered subject capable of reaching
a higher spiritual level. This is also documented as a lesson to teach
the individual how to resist and survive within a system that focuses
on the collective good. Also I shall address in this paper the use
of the erotic by Cuban writers now living in exile in capitalist countries;
I shall explore the position of their subjects within the boundaries
of the nation and the struggle between the nation and the individual
in a self-proclaimed “socialist” society, using the erotic as the locus
of subversion and resistance.